My name is Aaron Crapo and I am a rising senior Graphic Design major. During the summer of 2017, I interned as a UX Designer at Blizzard Entertainment! Blizzard is one of the biggest video game development companies in the world. I have been playing Blizzard video games since I was 7 years old, so this was a dream for me. I have always had my eye on this internship and when it finally opened up for design interns in November, I felt like I needed something to show in my portfolio that was Blizzard-inspired, so I made a desktop app for the game World of Warcraft. I did the UX/UI for it, but unfortunately did not know how to make it a real app. Once that was on my website, I quickly applied for the internship!
After a couple of weeks, I finally heard back from a recruiter about an interview! The first interview was with the Design Lead, Bruno Porrio, who later turned out to be my mentor. The interview went super well and he could tell how passionate I was about their games, and I landed a second interview. This next interview was a two-hour skype call with the whole design team and the project manager and one of the front-end engineers! That interview also went incredibly well and they called back two weeks later to tell me I got the internship!
During my time there, they gave me a wide variety of tasks to complete, and they really treated me like a full-time employee from day one. I cannot speak of all of the projects I specifically worked on yet without breaking my NDA, but in general I worked on GS5 (Hearthstone Web & Mobile Team) and I worked on the game’s Content/eSports + Fireside Gatherings! One project I can talk about because it is live is the Knights of the Frozen Throne announcement page! Knights of the Frozen Throne is the most recent expansion to their game Hearthstone. I helped out with feedback and ideas for the design of the page and I also designed all the wallpapers and opengraph images (all languages) for the expansion! I am most proud of the first project I worked on, which isn’t live yet, so I can’t be too specific, but I completely updated the macro for one of the Hearthstone pages and it was a very big project!
Throughout the short three months I was at Blizzard, I really felt like part of the team and was treated like a full-time employee! They gave me projects and work that was relevant and that mattered. It’s really cool knowing my fingerprints are on an official Blizzard website and will continue to influence future pages for time to come! I learned so much during my time there! I went into this internship not being super proficient in Photoshop and I came out feeling like an expert. Everyone there was so incredibly supportive and I really feel so much more confident going into my senior year here at MICA and starting my career path in UX/UI Design!
